


Shadow of a Giant

by brodmann



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Grief, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mourning, Post-Batman RIP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-12-07 11:07:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18234056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brodmann/pseuds/brodmann
Summary: Dick and Jason try to work together in the wake of Bruce’s passing.It goes as well as Dick expects it to.





	Shadow of a Giant

**Author's Note:**

> Set after Batman RIP/Final Crisis. Dick is Batman, Tim is still Robin, Damian isn’t Robin yet, Jason is still relentlessly expanding his criminal empire and BftC never happened. Makes a few references to events that occurred in Jason's original run as Robin as well as Nightwing: Year One.
> 
> Many thanks to [ictus](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ictus) for the invaluable beta!

His father used to tell him that being a man meant keeping his chin up even when he felt sad.

Looking back, he can’t recall feeling sad at the circus. But he must have, because he remembers telling himself to recall his dad’s aphorism long before he started living with Bruce.

When Dick looks up tonight, he sees Jason’s grin floating three inches away from his nose, the street light behind his head framing his hair like a halo.

Dick’s entire body aches. He tastes blood in his mouth. The sensation of Jason’s fist to his face is still smarting across his cheek.

“You’re in top form for someone who’s carrying eighty pounds of extra weight,” Jason says.

Jason has this painfully obvious affectation to his voice. Dick sees the trick but he doesn’t know how to work his way around it to the meat underneath. When it comes to Jason, everything that comes out of Dick’s mouth feels overly severe and dull and iron-laden. He has no idea how to act around Jason and he’s beginning to worry that he’ll never figure it out.

“Thanks.” Dick coughs.

“You’re welcome, stranger.”

Jason sticks out his hand. Dick hesitates.

Jason likes cloak and dagger entrances and jumping Dick when Dick’s back is turned. It’s nothing new; he’s been doing this since long before Dick put on the suit. But tonight Dick hesitates, because tonight felt harsher. Like it mattered more, was supposed to hurt more.

“Relax! I’m not going to bite.” Jason wiggles his fingers at him. “I was just taking you out for a test drive. After all, we don’t get a new Batman in town every day.”

Jason says this like it’s a new observation. It still feels new, in a sense. But the fact of the matter is that Dick's been acting as Batman for the past six months and Jason's been keeping an eye on him for just as long.

Dick takes Jason’s hand and Jason draws him upright like he weighs nothing at all. He’s three inches taller than Dick and thirty pounds heavier, but he never carries himself like the kind of person who's interested in using the effect his size can have, not outside of a fight.

“Thanks,” Dick says.

“You’re welcome, handsome,” he replies. “Now, have I got news for you.”

Jason feeds him intel on an arms trafficking gig.

Intel exchange on the background of an ambush has been the cornerstone of Jason’s interactions with him ever since day one with Black Lightning. A swipe here, a kick there, an escrima stick at Jason’s neck or a knife against his. Regardless of who wins, it ends the same way. With Jason rattling off unfailingly vital, sometimes life-saving, information for a case.

Dick suspects that Jason must get a kick out of it. Keeping Dick on his toes, forcing him to second-guess Jason’s motives. Making him feel bad for doubting him when he delivers and making him feel like a fool when he trusts him only to have the rug pulled out from under his feet.

 

 

Jason used to be comically small.

It infuriated him for reasons beyond what he could comprehend. Probably because it made him feel like even more of a bad guy, resenting a small, pitiful-looking teenager as much as he did. After he blew up at Jason for wearing the Robin suit he’d sat himself down to tell himself that he wasn’t being fair, that Jason was just a kid, that none of this was Jason’s fault, but the taste of bile in the back of his throat that came up whenever he thought about Jason refused to go away.

Still, Dick knew he needed to make it right, so he gave Jason his old suit as a gesture of reconciliation.

(And to give himself the illusion that he had some control over his own goddamn legacy.)

Giving Jason his contact details had been more of an afterthought.

“There are going to be times when you’re going to want to talk to someone,” Dick had explained. “I know that guy’s not the easiest to work with.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Jason had said, and laughed. Dick hadn’t laughed with him.

 

 

Dick’s comm unit blinks with Jason’s initials at four in the morning.

Jason has never established contact via comm unit out of nowhere before. A thousand images flash by in his head, all united by the same base concept: Jason somewhere out there, broken and bloody, breathing wetly and alone. Dick trips in his rush to answer the call.

“Hood,” he answers, and almost doesn’t recognise his own voice. He’s already out of bed and through the door, heading for Bruce’s study.

“Hey,” Jason says after a beat of silence. Dick strains for background noise— chatter, gunfire, sirens, anything to give him an indication of where Jason is and the kind of situation he’s in. Nothing.

Something like an eternity passes by before Jason speaks again.

“What are you wearing?” he asks.

Dick stutters to a stop. What is he wearing?

He closes his eyes and focuses on the sensation of his heartbeat slowing down.

“Excuse me?” he says when he finds his voice again.

Jason snorts. “Aw, are we not at the playful flirting stage yet?”

If this were anyone else, Dick could have thought of something else to say. But because it’s Jason, all he can come up with is, “Jason, what is this about?”

Jason groans loudly. “Jesus, you are so fucking dull.” Dick hears the rustle of fabric and then paper. “Fine. Be that way. Here, I did some digging yesterday. Picked up some details I thought you’d want to know about.”

Dick is too tired to do anything other than take the out Jason’s given him. Bruce’s armchair squeaks when he sits down.

No one’s used the study for a long time but there isn’t a single speck of dust. Dick makes a mental note to tell Alfred to take it easy as he reaches over to turn on the reading lamp.

“Go on.”

Jason tells him about a new lead he’s picked up by rubbing shoulders with his sources at a bar downtown. He’s conversational about it— he hyperbolises over how terrible the music had been, he describes the way the soles of his boots stuck to the floor and peeled off whenever he took a step in great detail, he parrots his source’s sickly-sweet greeting of ‘schnookums’ in an accented falsetto. The prevailing rumour is that prototype arms are being funnelled from a private research facility onto the street, and that another deal is going to be brokered between a facility insider and a distributor in two weeks time.

“Should I be writing this down?” Dick interjects, when it becomes clear that Jason is going to give him the full mile instead of a brief overview.

Jason scoffs. “Of course not! What kind of animal do you think I am? I have all of this on a file. I’ll send it to you later.”

Dick doesn’t ask why Jason is relaying all of this over to him on the phone when he has everything in a file. Better to accept this quietly, whatever it is.

The follow-up reconnaissance mission involves a sit-in at a nightclub in the upper east side to listen in on the deal in the VIP area upstairs. Jason asks Dick to bring the directional microphone and talks about how fond he is of W.E.’s new prototype, the one that no one’s supposed to know about.

Jason likes to do this. Show off how many fingers he has in how many pies, how much he found out about you while your back was turned.

Dick doesn’t give him the satisfaction of a reaction beyond a tired sigh.

“Alright. Will do.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Jason says. Dick can hear the toothiness of his grin.

 

 

The very first time Jason called him, he’d been lying back in Roy’s bed post-coitus. Somehow, inexplicably, he had never expected Jason to take up his offer, and his first thought had been that Jason would be none the wiser if he chose not to pick up; if he was questioned about it later he could simply say that he was busy.

He did pick up in the end, after an extended argument with himself about how much effort it’d take to reach for the night stand.

“Hello.”

There was a beat of silence.

“Hey, um. This is Jason.” More silence. “Is this Dick?”

“Yes. Speaking.”

“You said I could call you if I ever needed to talk,” Jason said. There was a question there.

“Sure did.”

“Okay.”

Even more silence.

“So? You needed to talk?” Dick felt himself brimming with impatience, and he knew that it was leaking out into his voice.

More silence, and then Jason broke, a torrent of staccato coming in through the speaker.

“Okay so we were on patrol and some stuff happened and I got hurt and Bruce freaked the hell out and it freaked me out and then he got so mad and I could see his face and it was scary and he tried to do something and I don’t—”

“Hold up. Slow down. Tried to what?”

Sharp inhale. Silence again.

“He tried to kill Two-Face,” Jason said in a whisper, like he’d break something if he spoke too loudly.

Dick sat himself up. He could see Roy’s back in his peripheral vision, moving around in the adjacent kitchen. “That can’t be true.”

“I could see it in his face! He wanted blood and I just knew in my gut that if I didn’t grab hold of him something bad would happen, so I did, and he fought me, he fought me until he wasn’t fighting me anymore and then we went home and now he’s acting like nothing happened and I just keep thinking that if I never stepped in then he really would have done it, he always tells me that killing is wrong, and I’m just— I don’t—”

Jason’s voice seemed to fade out into a high-pitched ringing. Whatever Jason said after that, Dick didn’t hear him.

“Did he kill him?” Dick asked, when he came to. He wasn’t sure if Jason had finished his story or if he had cut Jason off mid-sentence and there wasn’t a single part of him that cared.

“No! Jesus, no!”

“Alright. And are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Okay. Then what else happened?”

“What do you mean what else happened?” Jason’s voice rose. “Does anything else need to happen?!”

“Alright, alright. I get it.” Dick pinched the bridge of his nose. He had to get himself off the phone before he said something he’d regret. “You know Bruce. Even when he seems like he’s out of control, he isn’t.”

The line was silent for a long time. Dick wondered if Jason was going to finally point out how much of an asshole he was being.

It never came to fruition. Instead, Jason said, “Yeah, okay. Thanks. Sorry for disturbing you,” and hung up.

The worst part of it was that Jason really did sound sorry.

 

 

Jason is already at the nightclub when Dick arrives, sipping a White Russian through a straw. The first thought that occurs to Dick is that Jason isn’t old enough to drink.

“You look like you’re going to a job interview,” Jason says when Dick takes a seat beside him.

“It was either this or the sequin midriff.” It’s the first time he’s been able to make a joke around Jason in a long time.

“Yeah, that’s your problem. It’s always either too much or too little.”

Dick wonders if there’s something deeper to that that he’s supposed to understand, but Jason isn’t looking at him like there is. Jason is distracted, sipping on his drink while discreetly checking someone out at the bar.

“Your type?” Dick asks.

Jason blinks, his attention returning to Dick. “Just about,” he replies with a lopsided smile. “Doesn’t hurt when they’re prettier, though.”

After that, he reaches over to undo the top three buttons of Dick’s shirt. “Much better. Now you look like someone after a job interview instead of before, and your chest hair’s saying hi.”

Dick doesn’t know how Jason manages to draw him into an argument about the merits and demerits of V-necks, but he does, and time passes painlessly right up until their targets walk into the club. Dick never anticipated that anything with Jason could be painless.

“They’re here,” Jason says, nodding his head towards the entrance with a sneer. “Y’know, you’ve got some colourful characters in the grand game of big Gotham baddies. But why is it that when it comes to this kind of thing, the culprits always look the same? Crew cut, suit. Stocky-looking. Maybe a hand tatt or two. God. So boring.”

Dick laughs under his breath and turns on the directional microphone.

The ensuing conversation reveals a drop location for the weapons.

 

 

One night, on instruction from Babs, Dick had taken Jason out for a training session on the freight train from Gotham to Blüdhaven and then he had taken Jason out for ice cream. It had made him feel good about himself, to do something nice for someone he didn’t want to do a single nice thing for.

“What’s the worst thing you ever did when you were Robin?” Jason had asked him afterwards.

“I haven’t picked one out yet,” he replied. “The list of Dick Grayson’s Robin fuck-ups is long.”

Jason laughed. “I’m just trying to find out, I guess, where a guy like Bruce draws the line.”

It was then that Dick realised Jason didn’t know Bruce had fired him for getting hurt.

It was the perfect opportunity to reveal it— Dick knew exactly what it’d do to Bruce and Jason’s relationship— but he kept his mouth shut. He couldn’t say that it was out of the goodness of his heart. Instead it was more like protectiveness; his history with Bruce was something exclusive that Jason wasn’t allowed to touch.

“What are you worried about?” he asked instead.

Jason had looked down at his feet, dangling over the edge of the building. “Nothing. I just— a guy like Bruce, you expect him to draw a hard line about some things. And I keep waiting, but he hasn’t been drawing those lines. I’m kind of scared of what he’d let me get away with, as stupid as that sounds. Does that make sense?”

At the time, Dick had thought that Jason was talking about disobeying orders or sneaking off into the night. He wouldn’t find out about what Jason had done until much later.

“And that’s a bad thing? I think someone doth protest too much.”

Dick had been planning to chase it up. But then an alien invasion in New York demanded the attention of the Titans and that was as good of a reason as any to forget to call Bruce.

 

 

They coordinate a stakeout on the drop location in a condemned building across the road. Dick takes first shift.

Jason rests on the couch with a book while he waits, and Dick doesn’t know how he manages to look comfortable on the sofa in an aggressive way. Almost as if kicking his legs up is a power play.

“This stakeout is missing something,” Jason says out of the blue, two hours in.

“Something,” Dick repeats.

“Yeah. Meat.” Jason draws his knees to his chest and hops out of the sofa, adjusting his belt as he heads for the door. “There’s a hotdog stand three blocks from here. Want anything?”

It’s a strange olive branch, one Dick never expected Jason to extend. “Extra mustard,” he replies.

“Yessir.”

The first stakeout is unsuccessful, so there are more long nights after that. Jason brings hotdogs on every single occasion: extra mustard for Dick, topped with chili con carne for himself.

Over time, Dick finds out that Jason is a messy eater. He finds out that Jason likes inciting debates over topics of no consequence and likes them even more when they become heated. One night, Jason brings a six pack of Guinness and proselytises for an hour about craft beer.

It feels almost uncomfortably intimate to interact with him so normally, but Dick doesn’t question it out loud. He knows better than that.

 

 

Dick had found out about Jason’s death three months after his funeral, while floating in space on the USS Argus.

 

 

Everything falls into place after the supply drop. Dick barely has to raise his voice for the transport guy to spill the beans on who he’s being paid by and exactly where they need to look to find a paper trail. After that it’s a simple matter of calling in the GCPD and forwarding Gordon the evidence they’ve gathered for the conviction.

Jason is uncharacteristically quiet throughout the night.

“Dare I say good job?” Dick asks him, as the red and blue lights fade into the city.

Jason’s tone is as flat as death. “Yeah. Good job.”

Jason leaves after that without a word.

 

 

One week later, Dick turns on the morning news to find out that the mastermind behind the trafficking operation has been found dead in his cell. Poisoned.

 

 

It rains on the night that Dick decides to pursue the Red Hood.

It isn’t difficult to locate Jason when you know where to look. Jason has his own patrol route, areas he takes care of that Dick doesn’t have to. It’s where Dick intercepts him.

Jason gives chase as soon as he sees him. Dick follows, his heartbeat jack-hammering in his chest. He almost loses Jason five times. They traverse the entire south side of the city twice. Dick keeps looking out for a slip, a mistake, anything that’ll give him the home advantage, but Jason doesn’t make a single error of judgement.

“Stop running!” Dick yells after him, as if that’s going to convince him. His cape drags on him like lead or poison and his lungs are burning and Jason, Jason is as nimble as ever.

“You’re Batman, aren’t you?” Jason yells back, an unadulterated glee in his voice. “Isn’t Batman’s job to catch the bad guy?”

In the end, it’s the most classic move in the book that Jason doesn’t dodge. Dick doesn’t expect it to work, but out of sheer desperation he aims his grapple gun at Jason and shoots. Jason makes no move to cut the line before it goes taught; it circles his calf and tightens and slams him against the ground. Dick is too full of adrenaline to think about why it was so easy. He launches forward, pinning Jason to the roof by his wrists.

“Caught me,” Jason says, not so much as squirming. Rage swells in Dick like a wave.

“You murdered him!”

Jason’s wrists flex experimentally in Dick’s grip. He’s still smiling. “Ooh, I think I just felt a chill run up my spine. A few notes lower and you’re going to be reawakening all kinds of memories.”

And just like that, the rage disappears. A flash in the pan and now there’s nothing inside him except water, slowly rising in his lungs.

Jason looks at him expectantly. Dick knows what he’s waiting for. The explosion of moral condemnation, the simple fury over the taking of a human life, the conviction. Everything that Dick is supposed to be for him in this moment.

But what can he say? That he trusted him?

That the prospect that Jason was going to double-cross him had never crossed his mind?

That Dick didn’t know Jason was killing by the droves, not just rapists and drug dealers but anyone who threatened his position or fell out of line, and Dick had apparently decided to himself that that was fine as long as Jason didn’t commit those murders in front of him?

Slowly, Jason’s face changes. From expectation to bemused realisation.

“Oh, wow. You’re aren’t coping at all.”

Dick flinches. He wants to ask Jason why he did this to him, strung him along, recruited him to collaborate on an operation that culminated in the way that it did when Jason knew exactly where he stood. But he already knows the answer.

This is punishment.

The apology tumbles out of his mouth before he can stop himself.

“I’m sorry. Is that what you want to hear?”

Jason stares at him for a long time, his expression unreadable.

“What are you sorry for?” Jason asks. And of course Jason would make it like this, like pulling teeth.

(And there’s something off about the way Jason asks him, something Dick can’t put his finger on, but everything else is too loud for him to think about why.)

Dick inhales a trembling breath. The rain pelts down on his shoulders.

“For leaving you alone with him.”

The words come out of him like choked air from a hit to the diaphragm.

Dick thought that Jason would revel in this moment. Of winning, drawing the blood out of the stone, getting the vindication he always wanted.

Instead, Jason laughs incredulously.

“Is that what you’ve been tying yourself up into knots over?” Jason asks. “Not being there for me?”

Dick blinks. His mouth goes dry.

“You can’t be serious.” Jason sighs and shrugs. “I wasn’t your responsibility. You were a nice enough guy. A little standoffish, sure, but whatever. No big deal.”

No big deal.

It dawns on him, then. That all of it, all these moments he’s turned over and over and over in his head since Jason’s death, none of them mean anything at all.

When Dick opens his mouth to speak, his voice sounds foreign and far-off, like it’s coming from somewhere else in space and time.

“Then why? If you didn’t do this to get back at me, then why?”

Jason flexes his wrists again. “I just wanted to spend time with you,” Jason says. Simply, sincerely, without pretence. “This is the only kind of relationship we can have, really. And we need each other right now. Don’t we, Batman?”

Dick doesn’t feel like he’s holding Jason down anymore so much as he’s holding onto him. His shoulders shake.

Jason frowns. “Oh. Oh, hey now. Don’t make that face. You’re going to break my heart.” His voice is patronising, but when he strokes Dick’s face the touch is tender. Soft.

Jason tastes like nicotine gum.


End file.
